Which RPG should you choose? A guide for every kind of player

There are hundreds of tabletop roleplaying games in print, and more arrive every month. That is wonderful for the hobby and paralysing for anyone standing in front of a shelf. A list of the ten best games rarely helps either, because it ranks titles that were never trying to do the same thing. A folk horror mystery and a dungeon crawl are not competitors. They are different evenings.

So this page does not rank anything. It asks you a few questions instead, and then points you at the comparison or the starter guide that answers yours. Find the description that sounds like you, follow the link, and you should walk away with a decision rather than one more open tab.

Start here: three questions that decide it

What kind of story do you want to tell? This matters more than any rulebook, because genre decides the shape of an evening. A horror game asks you to be frightened and to keep going anyway. A heroic fantasy game asks you to be competent. An old school dungeon game asks you to be careful. Choose the feeling first and the argument about systems gets a great deal smaller.

How many rules do you want to learn? Answer honestly, and answer for the person who will run the game rather than for the group. Some games fit on a folded sheet of paper; others take a month of reading before the first session. Neither is better. But a heavy system in the hands of a reluctant game master dies in week three, and a very light system at a table that loves tactics can start to feel thin.

Who is at the table, and how often? A group that meets every Thursday can carry a campaign that runs for two years. A group that manages one evening a season needs mysteries that actually finish. And if there is no group at all, that is not a dead end: solo roleplaying is a real branch of the hobby now, with games designed for one person, a notebook and an hour.

You have never played a roleplaying game

Start with a box, not with a hardback. A starter set gives you ready-made characters, dice and a first adventure with the training wheels built in. The two obvious doors are Dungeons & Dragons, because everyone around you already plays it, and Daggerheart, because it is newer and kinder to the person running the table. Our comparison Daggerheart vs Dungeons & Dragons 5e lays out that choice in full.

You play D&D and want something else

The useful question is what is actually chafing. If it is the weight of character building and the missing sense of danger, go old school with Shadowdark vs Mörk Borg vs Old School Essentials. If it is that the dice never say anything about the story, read Daggerheart vs D&D 5e, where every roll also tips the narrative one way or the other. And if you like the 5e engine and only want a different world, The One Ring vs LOTR 5E covers a Middle-earth game built directly on the rules you already know.

You want horror

Horror splits into two questions. First: can you reason with the thing in the dark? Vaesen vs Call of Cthulhu answers that one, setting Nordic folklore creatures who have terms you can meet against a cosmos with no opinion about you at all. Second: are you a victim or an operative? Call of Cthulhu vs Delta Green compares 1920s civilians who read the wrong book with modern agents sent to clear up after them. The horror collection holds everything else.

You want science fiction

Science fiction horror has one clear fork: invent the monster yourself, or play inside the films. Mothership vs Alien RPG takes it apart. Mothership is a lean kit that hands the Warden procedure and no canon; Alien gives you Weyland-Yutani, xenomorphs and cinematic scenarios built to start and finish in one evening. For the rest of the genre, from the hard science of Traveller to the space western melancholy of Orbital Blues, browse the sci-fi collection. And when the fork is about tone rather than terror - space taken seriously or played for laughs - Traveller vs Paranoia weighs the hobby's oldest starfaring game against its most treacherous bunker.

You want Middle-earth

There are two officially licensed Middle-earth games, both from Free League, and almost nobody can tell them apart on a shelf. One rebuilds Tolkien in a system of its own, built around journeys, weariness and Hope. The other runs on the d20 rules your group already knows. The One Ring vs The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying 5E settles it in about five minutes of reading.

You want old school and deadly

Fragile characters, no balanced encounters, and a dungeon that does not care whether you were ready for it. Shadowdark vs Mörk Borg vs Old School Essentials compares the three most common doors into that corner: a torch that burns in real time, a world already counting down, and the 1981 rules rewritten for clarity. The OSR collection has the rest, and if you want knights and folklore more than dungeons, our Mythic Bastionland starter guide is the place to look.

You want to play alone

No group is not the same as no game. Thousand Year Old Vampire walks an immortal through centuries of written prompts while their oldest memories are quietly overwritten, and it is the game most people mean when they say solo journaling; there is a starter guide for it too. If you are curious how it compares to a gentler journaling game, The Librarian's Apprentice vs Thousand Year Old Vampire sets the two side by side. Be Like a Crow is lighter and stranger: you play a corvid, and all you need is the rulebook, a deck of cards and a pen. And if you already own Shadowdark, SoloDark is Kelsey Dionne’s own solo ruleset for it, with an oracle for yes or no questions and a torch timer built for one. Start at the Solo & Journaling collection.

You only have one evening

Some games are not campaigns at all, and that is the point of them. Alice is Missing is played in near silence over text messages and is over in a single sitting. Dread replaces dice with a Jenga tower, so the tension is physical and everyone at the table can see how close the end is. The Quiet Year needs no game master at all: two to four players draw the map of a community week by week until the Frost Shepherds arrive. Mörk Borg also does a complete arc in an evening, which is why it turns up in the old school comparison above.

You are playing with children or a mixed group

Mixed tables want short character creation, low lethality and a hook everybody understands. Kids on Bikes drops you into a small town in the 1980s with powers nobody fully controls. Mausritter gives every player a brave mouse with a sewing-needle sword and a real dungeon, and its inventory is laid out on cards that children read faster than adults do. Land of Eem is warm, muppet-shaped fantasy adventure, and Dragonbane is classic fantasy with a sense of humour and a boxed introduction. For a group that mainly wants to laugh, try the Comedy & Satire collection and Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme, which is exactly what it looks like.

All the comparisons in one place

Nothing here fits yet?

We add comparisons as the questions come in, so if the pair you are weighing up is not here yet, the starter guides index is the next best thing. There are close to fifty of them, one per game line, and each explains what the game is, what you need to buy first and who it suits. They are written for someone who has never opened the book.

Or browse by mood: fantasy, horror, sci-fi, OSR, solo and journaling, or comedy and satire. And if you would rather simply ask, tell us who is at your table and how long an evening you have, and we will name a game. That is what a curated shop is for.

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